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BY ANDY HUMM | In his time, Tom Stoddard was one of the most high-profile gay leaders in the country, heading The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (Lambda Legal) from 1986 (when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws) to 1992—some of the worst years of the AIDS plague to which Stoddard himself succumbed in 1997. He also drafted an explanatory preamble to NYC’s gay rights bill that helped pass it in 1986 after a 15-year battle. And he was an adjunct professor of law at NYU.

On a sunny Spring day this May 12th—what would have been his 77th birthday—Lambda’s current leaders and supporters were joined by veterans of LGBTQ legal battles to dedicate a plaque in Stoddard’s honor at the New York City AIDS Memorial Park (at St. Vincent’s Triangle, corner of Greenwich Ave. & West 12th St.).

Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings, who is leading the group in multiplying challenges to laws–in the states and out of the Trump administration restricting the rights of LGBTQ people (especially transgender people) and people with HIV–said, “It is so important in this time when our opponents are trying to erase our history that we commemorate it and remember it and honor the pioneers like Tom, who helped us have the freedoms we have today and to use them as an inspiration to continue the fight so that the next generation will be freer than we are.”

Jennings noted that, “More gay men died of AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s than the total number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.” He said many of them died at the old St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was across the street from the Memorial Park.

Richard Burns, who had been the longtime director of the LGBTQ Community Center and is the board chair of the new American LGBTQ+ Museum, said that over 116,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS and “that sometimes it’s hard to remember what our lives were like in the 1980s, but I’m glad that we’re remembering together today.” Burns and Stoddard were on the first national board of Lambda in 1980—though the group was founded in 1973. He said Tom “was a courageous and stubborn leader and a key strategist for our movement,” leading Lambda through tremendous growth and opening their Los Angeles office.

Stoddard’s surviving husband Walter Reiman said, “I’m touched and grateful.” He met Stoddard at a Lambda event, “moving in within weeks.” He said that when “Tom was presented with Lambda’s Liberty Award, he said that our movement is based on a very simple notion: Our right to love. It’s also based on a broader, more demanding notion: Our duty to love.” Reiman said, adding, “Tom never abandoned the politics of hope” despite the challenges he faced as he was dying of AIDS. “You have to believe there’s the possibility of a real future and you have to work every day to achieve that future. It won’t come about on hope alone but it won’t come about without hope… Tom’s hope for medical progress was vindicated, though not for him.”

Judge Marcy Kahn told us, “I was delighted when Tom became the executive director of Lambda Legal. I was on the board at the time and he did transform the organization. In his later years, he created a path for LGBTQ people to join the US military,” referring to Stoddard’s founding of the Campaign for Military Service, though President Clinton’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell ban on open service would not be lifted until 2010 under President Obama. She said his group “transformed our military and the way society views LGBTQ people.”

Suzanne Goldberg, a Lambda veteran and the founding director of Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Clinic as well as a former  Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the US Dept. of State, said at the reception, held afterwards at nearby Mino Brasserie (225 W. 12th St.), “Tom was formative for me as a lawyer and as an advocate and entirely shaped the way I see using the law as a way to seek justice—using the law with intention to create a landscape for social change and how do you talk about the law in terms of what moves people. He taught me it’s never just about what you put in your legal filing. It’s also about how you communicate that to the public.” They worked together on getting benefit caps lifted for people with HIV/AIDS—and got that incorporated into the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I asked Michael Lavery (a co-founder of Lambda with Bill Thom, Rodney Eubanks, Nick Russo, and Shepherd Raimi) how Stoddard would have reacted to the current anti-LGBTQ onslaught coming from Trump and the GOP and he said, “I think he’d be angry and that he’d be enthused about fighting back. During the AIDS crisis he was a leader in the resistance.”

These small commemorative plaques on benches in this park are relatively new. Stoddard’s reads,

In memory of Tom Stoddard

Executive Director

Lambda Legal, 1986-92,

Friend/Leader/Teacher/Advocate

It costs $5,000 to have a plaque placed on a bench for five years, at which point it can be renewed. Most honor people who died of AIDS including “ACT UP comrades,” Robert Mapplethorpe, designer Will Smith, Nathan Kolodner, Raymond Jacobs, David Wonjorowicz, and Martin Delaney but also activists such as the Urvashi Vaid and Rodger McFarlane as well as living legends such as Elton John.

For more info about the bench plaques, click here.

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